The Big Easy

We were in town long before the mardis gras activities were to take place, but we never would’ve guessed as much from the chaotic scenes unfolding on every corner. People were carousing from noon til night. Ladders and clusters of fold-out chairs were already staked out along the roads for parade viewing, and beads already lay everywhere.

New Orleans is a hard city to get a grasp of because it’s so diverse in so many ways. Some people are really hard to understand because of the accent but others are perfectly articulate. Some are very wealthy but dress like paupers. There’s definitely no “Oh man, people from New Orleans are all [insert stereotype]” reputation that we could pin down..

We’ll put it this way -- it wouldn’t be strange to be in a fancy restaurant and see people from all different walks of life side-by-side. There could be a lawyer wearing a cartoonish seersucker suit next to a guy in flip flops and a Saints jersey. There could be a college student sitting next to a doctor wearing suit pants, a vest, no shirt, and nipple clamps. The whole atmosphere was weird as shit, but in a good way.

There’s no place like home

After being in New Orleans for about two hours, we realized both of our drivers licenses were expiring at the end of the week. When you spend your life living in and driving a vehicle, a valid license is pretty clutch. We booked our flights and made arrangements to leave the van.

We pulled into a long-term parking lot at the airport and a surly lady in the booth was already pressing an earpiece and radioing someone in the lot to announce our arrival. We thought it strange that empty vehicles needed presidential security measures but wanted to park nonetheless.

The woman had a thick accent, which turned the easy task of parking into a herculean feat of translation. As we stopped at the booth the woman looked at us and said something like “Gon’ park-in?” I said yes (subtext: obviously. What do you think, I came to just block the gate and paint my nails?).

She then said “Na how beeg da vehicle?” with an attitude. I politely remarked I didn’t know. She flashed an irritated scowl and we had a kind of standoff. The only missing element was a tumbleweed to blow between us.

After what seemed a minute she grunted “The gate dun gone down”. The gate was already down, and had been down since I pulled up. I was beginning to get frustrated and said “I see that. Does the gate go UP? I want to go IN the lot”. Her rambling response took about an hour but we managed to roughly interpret “the gate is on a timer and because the van is so long, the bar may come down before you fully pass through the gate”.

Before lifting the bar to let us pass through, she instructed “Alright get real close, na” and I did as commanded. I pulled right up to the bar, nearly touching it with the front bumper. She flipped the switch and barked “GO, GO, GO!!” as the bar raised. I gunned it, and we hadn’t driven ten feet before the bar thumped down on the roof of the van. We kept going, hearing the rat-a-tat as the bar dragged all along the side. It was an inauspicious start.

It was midnight and our flight was in 7 hours. We figured we’d sleep in the van til morning and grab a shuttle to our terminal, but we had forgotten that the parking lot was under surveillance by the secret police.

A shuttle bus driver came over and asked what time we were leaving. Thinking he’d forget or not care, Dan said “Oh, we’ll head over in about an hour”. Sure enough an hour later, on the dot, he came back. At this point we just told the guy the truth - we were gonna wait it out in the van. The shuttle driver didn’t care at all, but his superior officer (booth lady) would have none of it. We had to leave and find a new lot. On the way out we were half tempted to floor it and explode through the fucking gate.

Back on the homefront

When I first grew a beard, I made jokes on stage about bearded people I resembled. After a show, another comic said “Dude, you look just like Charles Manson!”. He said it to me after every subsequent show, too -- it really took root with this guy. Anyway, I always thought that was bad comparison. Manson has long, black hair and I have short, reddish hair. After seeing myself in my new license picture, though, I think he may have been on to something.

Maybe not Manson exactly, but certainly a mixture of murderous satanist and bedraggled hobo. This look kills the ladies.

Whereas I look like a mass murderer in my photo, Dan looks like he’s about  to be a one-time murderer. With a tucked chin and sideways-cocked head, it looks like he was staring at the camera when suddenly across the room he spotted the guy who killed his father.

Back to NOLA for showtime

The show was on valentines day and few comics showed up - which is surprising considering a lot of comics are horribly alone. I thought valentines day would be a comics unification day - a day to mock consumerized love while tearing down our own walls to connect with each other. That’s not how it shook out.

The first comic went up and was having a really good set, until a group of ladies was being really loud in the back. He asked them to keep it down politely enough, but the leader of the party stormed to the front of the stage aggressively and shouted something to the effect of “You don’t have a Netflix special, you’re a loser and you’ll never make it”.

Instead of just quieting down a bit, this lady chose the nuclear option as a first response and the comic reciprocated in true Cold War, M.A.D. fashion. He said something to the effect of “You’re an asshole and I hope you die”. She and about 8 others in her cadre stormed out. The show was off to a great start.

Dan went up two slots after that. As he was launching into his set, a guy with that obvious ‘I’ve got drugs in my backpack look’ shouted out “You look like a vegan!”. Dan handled it well. He asked the guy “Are you wearing a backpack?” and the guy said “No, it’s a bulletproof backpack” so of course Dan raked him over the coals for a while.

I got up next and ran a few jokes that didn’t work. I got the impression that the audience was looking for more interaction than material so I riffed for a while but it didn’t go anywhere. It was basically a few minutes of odd questions and crowd interactions. I meant to circle back to material on dating and valentine's day but I forgot to - on the one day they would have actually worked.

There were only about six comics at the show, so it was a short one. We hung out with the host afterwards and exchanged stories and contact information. The host had to go to another spot, so we went back to the van to plan the next trip. We kicked around a few ideas but landed on a little place called   Hattiesburg.